Director Rosie Hidalgo Delivers Remarks at the National Institute of Justice 2024 National Research Conference

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Good morning! I want to thank the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) for hosting this panel discussion today commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and for inviting me to participate. I also want to extend my deep gratitude to each of you here for your hard work and dedication; and for coming together to see how we can continue to learn from one another.

I am honored to have the opportunity to serve as the Director of the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) and to collaborate with so many dedicated individuals and organizations committed to furthering our nation’s vision for ending sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking and other related forms of gender-based violence.

OVW is tasked with overseeing the implementation of key parts of VAWA, landmark bipartisan legislation first enacted by Congress in 1994. The hallmark of VAWA is a coordinated community response (known as a CCR), which seeks to bring together agencies and community partners across many disciplines to address the needs of survivors. From victim advocates to law enforcement officers and investigators, to healthcare personnel to educational institutions, community-based organizations and judges and courtroom officials, how each person responds often determines how, of if, survivors are able to access safety, justice and healing. Since survivors’ lives do not exist in silos, it is therefore critical that no individual or entity works in a silo because it takes all of us to prevent and effectively address gender-based violence.

Each subsequent reauthorization of VAWA has provided an opportunity for stakeholders and policymakers to identify what works well and how we can continue to scale up, as well as identify gaps and barriers that need to be addressed, ensuring that these efforts are rooted in the voices and lived realities of survivors. Research and evaluation play an important role in identifying the gaps and barriers, as well as the promising practices.

The most recent VAWA reauthorization in 2022 is the most expansive yet, establishing numerous new grant programs and initiatives in order to enhance the ways in which we can support communities to prevent and address gender-based violence.

Additionally, VAWA funding increased by more than 30% in just the last three years, allowing OVW to distribute a record amount of grant funding. In Fiscal Year 2024, Congress increased VAWA funding to $713 million, which is the highest amount that has ever been appropriated.

The development of the original VAWA legislation was rooted in the lived experiences of survivors, and their courage and leadership to tell their stories to educate policy makers, as well as advocates who helped raise awareness about these critical issues. These leaders pushed for federal legislation, called for investments in research, advocated for funding to improve services and training and co-created much of the work that informs policy and legislation today.

Just last week, we met with stakeholders and Technical Assistance (TA) providers at the VAWA 30th anniversary TA event to reflect on promising practices and discuss available data and research and how they continue to shape the evolution of policies and practices.

Congress has appropriated some VAWA funding each year to support research on gender-based violence at NIJ. Additionally, OVW has had statutory authority since the beginning to use some of its program funds to study emerging issues and evaluate VAWA-funded approaches, including demonstration programs. In 2016, however, OVW launched the Research and Evaluation Initiative with support from NIJ and as a complement to NIJ’s longstanding portfolio of research on gender-based violence. Every year since then, OVW has issued a call for proposals that invites applicants to study a broad range of topics using a wide range of methods. We intentionally keep these grant opportunities very open, seeking to foster practitioner-research partnerships, since practitioners who work closest with survivors know about emerging innovations ripe for evaluation before we do and can partner with researchers to develop research proposals.

To that end, at OVW, our Research and Evaluation Initiative supports collaboration between researchers and practitioners to study VAWA-funded approaches. We’ve funded studies looking at everything from victim notification protocols for cases in which a sexual assault kit is tested after having been shelved for years, to the evaluation of a therapeutic horticulture program at a domestic violence shelter. We’ve also funded a training program for faith leaders to help them support congregants who disclose domestic violence. We fund projects that employ community-based participatory research, quasi-experimental designs, randomized controlled trials and more. In fact, several of our Research and Evaluation grantees are presenting their work here at this conference!

Since 2016, the Research and Evaluation Initiative has awarded over 50 grants, totaling more than $21 million, to study ways to improve responses to gender-based violence in victim services, law enforcement, prosecution and the courts. In fact, last year OVW awarded $3.1 million in new research grants. Among these projects is an evaluation of a flexible financial assistance program for domestic violence survivors. This study aims to show how cash assistance can help survivors for whom financial barriers impede their path to safety and recovery, recognizing that survivors often know best what they need. Another study will examine the occupational and economic needs and experiences of domestic violence victim advocates and will use its findings to adapt and pilot an innovative economic empowerment program. Preliminary research on economic empowerment programs has shown positive impacts, including improved financial management and related behaviors.

We see our evidence-building activities not as a way of limiting the ways people work in their communities to support survivors and hold harm-doers accountable, but rather, to expand that work and better understand how, and why, under what circumstances and for whom certain strategies are helpful.

We’re especially interested in supporting research that can help us learn from strategies created by and for survivors from historically marginalized and underserved communities. We know that gender-based violence places a disproportionately heavy toll on marginalized communities, often at the intersection with other issues that create additional barriers to seeking effective services and access to justice. It is also from these communities that especially novel and promising ways for reducing risk factors and facilitating protective factors for gender-based violence are emerging.

As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of VAWA this month, it is an opportunity for all of us to collectively reflect on the substantial progress that has been made — but also how much further we have to go. There have been significant paradigm shifts in society’s perceptions of gender-based violence and our responses to it, but many survivors still encounter significant challenges navigating complex systems and accessing critical resources and support.

Addressing these gaps and barriers requires consistent, long-term coordination, which is why just last year the White House launched the first-ever U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence (GBV), with the collaboration of more than 15 federal agencies. The Plan advances a whole-of-government approach to preventing and ending gender-based violence — which we refer to as a “federal coordinated community response” — and it acts as a blueprint that builds on the lessons learned and achievements made through the efforts of survivors, advocates and others in the field.

The GBV National Plan encourages all federal agencies to strengthen their role in supporting efforts to prevent and address gender-based violence. It also calls for strengthening research efforts to better understand the needs and implement solutions. At OVW, we’re working with our colleagues across government to widen the aperture of the various tools we all use to measure social problems and evaluate ways of mitigating them.

The GBV National Plan focuses on seven pillars, starting with prevention as Pillar 1. While Pillar 7 of the GBV National Plan focuses on Research and Data, there are clear research implications embedded throughout the other six pillars, as well as opportunities to work across and beyond systems to advance our understanding of what strategies make a real difference for preventing gender-based violence and ameliorating its impacts on people, families and communities.

We have seen how research has had an impact on the evolution of VAWA, including helping support advocacy for the inclusion of special Tribal criminal jurisdiction to address the high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault perpetrated by non-Indian abusers in Indian country; helping provide evidence to strengthen protections at the intersection of domestic violence and firearms; and helping shine a light on the importance of addressing the disproportionate impact of GBV on historically marginalized and underserved populations, to name a few.

One way that our work has been bolstered by another agency’s research is longitudinal research on the Domestic Violence Housing First model in Washington State that was funded by the Department of Health and Human Services. Among other promising discoveries from this work, we learned that flexible financial assistance contributes greatly to survivors’ safety and stability. These findings informed OVW’s request for appropriations specifically to stand up a flexible financial assistance program, for which Congress provided appropriations last year.

Likewise, when we surveyed research on restorative justice to inform our program planning and later relied on it to support our appropriations requests, we looked to research that was funded by the National Science Foundation on a restorative justice-based abusive partner intervention program.

And speaking of collaboration, I want to extend a special thanks to my colleagues from the NIJ and the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC). NIJ helped us establish our Research and Evaluation Initiative back in 2015 and 2016, and we work closely with NIJ and OVC to ensure we’re doing meaningful work in the spaces where science and ending gender-based violence overlap.

I invite all of you to reach out to OVW as we strive to learn more about the protective factors and promising practices that need to be scaled up; the challenges and barriers that victims face; and how can we improve our partnership and strengthen a coordinated community response to more effectively address these issues. We’re also interested in learning more about other research and data efforts focus on helping prevent violence; support survivors to access safety, justice and healing; and equip communities with the tools they need to eliminate gender-based violence.

As we move forward, we must continue to amplify the voices and leadership of survivors — work you all do every day — to advance a whole-of-society approach that continues to lift these issues out of the shadows, support survivors and hold offenders accountable. It is only together that we can build a world that affirms the dignity, rights and humanity of every individual, a world where gender-based violence is not tolerated, and a world where healing and justice are accessible to all. Thank you.